The present invention relates to a riding lawn mower and more particularly to a midmount riding lawn mower having a mower deck that is swingable from a mowing configuration to an access configuration having a height adjustment mechanism that easily captures the mower deck for mowing and releases the deck for access and a pair of arms which form a parallelogram when the deck is in the mowing configuration and extend outwardly in the access configuration.
Prior mowers have included a mower deck that is mounted such that the deck can tilt or rotate to a position conducive for maintenance of the deck's under housing (e.g. cleaning, replacing blades, etc). Typically, decks of this type have been described as “tiltable” or “tilting” such as in the Sameshima U.S. Pat. No. 5,079,907 and Shroeder U.S. Pat. No. 4,779,406 respectively. Prior art structures have been complicated, hard to operate, expensive to manufacture and/or present other problems both in use in mowing and in trying to convert between a mowing configuration and an access configuration.
The present invention is especially useful in conjunction with a midmount mower wherein the mower deck is mounted between the front and rear wheels of the device. In such a device, it is desirable to make conversion between the mowing configuration and the access configuration easy and quick. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to provide a support structure for the deck that maintains the deck level during mowing and allows for easy cutting height adjustment. It is also desirable to provide such a device that utilizes a single drive belt that can be easily removed to allow for conversion. Also, a simple to use level adjustment mechanism is desirable to allow for fine adjustment of deck level that is required to correct for damage, tolerance variation or to modify the deck to be slightly non parallel to the ground in accordance with the desires of the operator.